Mireille Silcoff: Learning to cope with the itch to pitch

Learning to cope with the itch to pitch

I am not a TV person. Some evenings I try to be. Usually it goes the same way: I declare I am having a TV Night. I imagine it will be relaxing. I make appropriate snacks. I don pajamas with childlike pattern. I kick Mike off the sofa, telling him I don’t care who is playing hockey. Then I determinedly click through all 110 channels in our cable box and find nothing I want to watch. I leave the room, passing the control back to Mike, my bowl of pita chips and Bears of Banff sleepwear now somehow embarrassing.

Mike is not just a TV person, he is a TV producer. I am writing this while he is on the French Riviera, at a television conference. As I type, I imagine he is making big deals on a yacht weighted with German executives screaming “buy!” and “sell!” into cellphones while smoking big cigars with their suit sleeves rolled up.

Mike never brings me to the French Riviera conference. He says no one at his production house brings spouses. But I think he’s just afraid I am going to start pitching the Germans. Because while I am not a lover of television, I am also not a person without TV ideas.

This is, in a way, the product of a long-standing personal weakness. In the presence of any call for ideas, I become possessed. Can you envision a terrier attacking a garden hose? It’s a little like that. Once my teeth are in, I can’t get them out. Ideas will be spraying everywhere. I will be standing in the shower, and it will be raining epiphanies having to do with the theme of your son’s bar mitzvah, or the title of your book, or, in the case of my husband, who is always looking for the new and the fresh and the not-yet-done in TV Land, his next blockbuster televisual success story.

“Mike, I have an idea!”

“You are dripping water all over the floor —”

“It doesn’t matter! Listen to this. It’s a mystery series. But the plots will all hinge on wonderful antiques and works of fine art, so viewers can learn about art and antiques as they are unravelling the mysteries, and —”

“How about you just give me the elevator pitch?”

By elevator pitch Mike means a sales pitch short enough to be made on your average executive elevator ride. Little House on the Prairie meets So You Think You Can Dance; Iron Chef meets 2001: A Space Odyssey. That sort of thing.

“Elevator pitch? Easy. Midsomer Murders meets the art history nun.”

Midsomers Murders is one of the very few shows I have in recent years watched on TV, and that’s only because it’s been on Book TV. Book TV might be the worst channel on Canadian television. They just play the same shows over and over again (Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman is on six times today). Still, I am slightly attracted to Book TV, because it’s a channel that has the word “book” in it, so I imagine it will be more like books and less like TV. Another show that pops up regularly in my TV ideas is a program nobody watches called Karma Trekkers. The art-history nun is also disturbingly present, and she has not been on television in a really long time, and when she was on TV, just stood in front of Old Masters paintings in full habit.

Mike has suggested, kindly, that maybe I should seek out my friends who work in radio and give them some of my great pitches. He has also tried to educate. He has sat me in front of shows he thinks I should see such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mad Men, 30 Rock. But I watch and I feel vaguely wrong. I feel like there is a backlog of CBC Tapestry podcasts I might be listening to, but instead here I am in the middle of the mainstream, being bombarded with both sound and vision.

“What if there was a show called Gurus? Every week it features a different guru. From a different spiritual tradition!”

“That sounds like Tapestry.”

“What if you put wayward souls on a road trip with the gurus? It could be like a quest, a trek, if you will —”

“You mean like Karma Trekkers?”

Sometimes, after midnight, if I can’t sleep I will watch Classic Arts Showcase. Classic Arts Showcase is an anodyne marathon of opera and classical music videos lasting several hours. It’s what they play on the local PBS affiliate after they stop broadcasting real shows. It’s about as exciting as watching a test pattern, a phenomenally middlebrow test pattern, filmed in the 1980s, where all Doctor Fausts and Rodolfos have hair like Andrew Ridgeley from Wham! In the middle of the night, I used to watch Newsworld, but since they redesigned the channel to include blood-red graphics swooshing all over the place all the time, it feels to me like watching news of my computer screen saver being brutally murdered 24/7, so I have stopped.

A few months ago there was an article in Psychology Today about behavioural scientists having isolated a type they’ve named the Highly Sensitive Person. This is a person who feels like the scrim between them and stimuli is too thin, who feels like things go in too far, and so they often have to have quiet time to process the data. I read the article out loud to Mike and he said, “Yes, that sounds like you.”

“What do you mean, me? I’m pitching you a TV show. It could be called The Sensitives. ‘Watch them take everything too seriously. To you, it’s just Mad Men, to them it’s some existential dilemma — ’ ”

I’m now looking through some of the catalogues Mike brought back from the Riviera last year. There’s a Japanese game show called Light Sleepers, where the person who stays awake the longest wins. There are a shocking number of shows from around the globe about mothers and daughters duking it out for the same hot lover, which I suppose is the icky yet logical extension of the cougar-themed programming that began airing some 10 years ago. There are seven shows from different countries called Sold!, and one from the U.K. called Pants-Off Dance-Off, in which stripping contestants are called “Pancers.”

Pants-Off Dance-Off is a problem for me, because it’s a phrase like an ear bug, one of those looping melodies not easily dislodged from brain. I am presently writing various words, but all I’m hearing inside is “Pantsoffdanceoff! Pantsoffdanceoff! Pantsoff-
danceoff!” At the moment, Pants-Off Dance-Off is to my cerebellum what Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman is to Book TV’s current programming. It’s going to be playing all day. Now if you will excuse me, I feel a pitch coming on.

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